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a refrigerator with lamb and tempeh
Friday, July 1 2016
This morning at the brick mansion, my main goal was to attach the wiring for light above the stairs to the attic apartment to the wiring for the rest of that apartment. As things stood, that light was connected to the wiring for the apartment beneath it, which Central Hudson had flagged as an issue. In hopes of figuring out what was going on, I managed go climb up through the missing steps in the abandoned stairway beneath that stairway, and then climb the steps of that abandoned stairway to a hole in the wall where a couple romex cables came out. These entered the wall containing one of the switches for the offending lights, so it seemed likely that one of them carried the offending power. But my testing revealed that both cables were connected somehow to a switch on the other side of that wall, one for a motion-actived light illuminating a common stairway used by the attic and the apartment beneath it. Both cables traveled to junction boxes in the basement and continued to an ancient box containing a terminal strip designed to connect individual wires to individual other wires. A little testing revealed that there were wires for two separate apartments (that is, coming from separate circuit breaker boxes) present in that box. I'd thought I'd tested one of the romex cables completely and determined it dead before cutting it off at the box, but I was wrong; there was a massive bright white flash that vaporized a divot from the cutting jaws of my needle-nose pliers (one I'd salvaged using a magnet on a string from the lake bottom off the dock at our Adirondack cabin last summer). It was a good thing that I hadn't been grounded and that the handle on those pliers were rubberized. This is why, when I work with electrical wire, I always treat it as though it is live.
Since these cables didn't seem to have anything directly to do with the wiring problem I was attempting to solve, I went up to the bottom of the stairway illuminated by the offending light and disassembled the switch plate to one of the two switches controlling it (it being one of those dual-switch setups that seem so magical to people just learning about wiring). I'd hoped to maybe connect it up to the switch on the other side of the wall (the one whose cables I had access to) and change the ultimate source of the juice down in the basement. But when I got the plate off the wall and looked in the box, all I could see were the three wires of a fat three-wire romex going into the switch and that was all. There didn't seem to be any hot wire for me to replace. Getting this information was expensive; in the process of opening up the box, it became detached from whatever it had been attached to in the wall, which was made of lath & plaster and started to disintegrate around the hole. I managed to cobble it back together such that the switch and switch plate didn't move around too much when touched, but it's the kind of thing I really need to come back and fix some time.
I went up the stairs and opened up the box for the other switch, which logic dictated had to have more complicated wiring. But I looked in there and it seemed as simple as the one at the bottom of the stairs. How was this possible? This switch box was a double-wide one and contained a switch for a light that was on the correct circuit, so perhaps I could fix the whole problem here. But I was running out of time and the woman from the second floor kept bothering me, coming up with things for me to do for her. I finally shooed her away by saying the wiring at the bottom of the stairs was "very dangerous."
I drove home feeling defeated. I'd accomplished almost nothing in the two hours I'd spent at the house; indeed, I'd actually gone backwards: the motion-sensing light above the stairs up to the second and third floors now wasn't working, and I'd run out of time to fix it. I also mulled a few revelations: some tenants are much more high-maintenance than others, and doing electrical wiring while distracted and/or hungry is a needlessly dangerous. (I hadn't eaten anything all morning, and didn't find the time to snack on my Chex until the drive home.)
Gretchen was visibly disappointed when I told her how little I'd gotten done. When I explained her how fucked up and dangerous the wiring is, she wondered if perhaps we should just hire electrician. That was fine with me, though of course it was unlikely we'd be able to find one before tomorrow, when I intended to return to the brick mansion to continue my work. As for the now-inoperative stairway light, Gretchen thought it best to take a number of battery-powered lanterns there so there wouldn't be even one night of poor illumination for our new tenants. She also sent an email to all the tenants telling them that they weren't to disturb or distract me while I was working at the mansion, since a lot of what I do there is dangerous and requires concentration.
Given the discouraging way the day had begun, I had a surprisingly productive workday in my remote workplace. I built four different report-generating scripts (one of which I turned around in only about ten minutes) and then debugged a horrendous chunk of code driving a donor database contact searching system. The code consisted of four or five multi-hundred-line functions, all of which required additional information to make the necessary joins and look at the correct columns of the new search parameter I added. I'm especially good at making old code to bend to my will and serve new purposes, but there was a period this afternoon when I wanted to give up. But I later, after I'd successfully gotten the new search parameters working, I looked at the timestamps of my bitchy posts on this subject in Slack and saw that I'd worked less than two hours on it total. I'm good at my job, damn it!
Earlier today, just after I got back from the brick mansion, Gretchen had suggested going on "a date" tonight, just the two of us. We hadn't done anything like that in a long time. Initially I'd thought I would never be in the mood for such a thing today, but after the successful workday, I was eager to. I even skipped out of work a half hour early.
I'd thought we'd be going to some place like La Florentina, but when Gretchen floated a different idea of a new place she'd heard about up in Saugerties, it sounded good to me. So by a little after 8:00 pm, Saugerties was the direction in which we were driving. As we came out around a bend on Hurley Mountain Road, we saw the most spectacular segment of a rainbow we'd ever seen. It was a shaft-like base of an arc in the northeast with such good color saturation that one could even seen the band of purple. As we kept driving, we noticed that there was also a second, lesser rainbow nearby (inside the arc of the brighter one). Double rainbow, man! I started singing a little ditty that began "Double rainbow, you're the one" to the tune of "Rubber Duckie."
Saugerties was bustling with pedestrians on this particular evening, and there was even a pedestrian cop on the main corner, presumably there to keep the good vibes from turning into something darker. Gretchen identified a hipster as we walked to our destination, but for the most part the people of Saugerties tend more towards white trash than any other demographic. There are a lot of waddling fatties, and such people always seem to be in front of you on the sidewalk. But we were in no hurry.
Our destination was a newish restaurant called Rock Da Casbah. It was more rock than Casbah, though the lanterns around the bar and the embossed details on the metal sheets covering the drop ceiling had a vaguely Middle-Eastern vibe. Rock the Casbah attracted a younger crowd that most of the restaurants we frequent. As for the food, it ranged from lamb to tempeh (it's odd to think of them sharing a refrigerator). We'd come because we heard the vegan options were good. Soon after we showed up, some guy from a local brewery came around to offer us samples of his beer. He had session IPA that was almost to my liking, though the notes of grapefruit were too lost in the bitter, so I went with a more-reliable (if somewhat meh) Lagunitas IPA. As for Gretchen, she got a mixed alcoholic drink called an Arnie Palmer. We started out with fries, pot stickers (they had a weird spice neither of us liked), and spring rolls. Those last two were super greasy, which is something Gretchen will joyfully tolerate in a restaurant but find kind of gross when Ray cooks that way.
Later we got a chili, a vegan mac & cheese, and a pene dish with two different mushrooms and tempeh. While the first two were unremarkable, that pasta dish was among the most delicious things Gretchen and I have had in the bicounty area.
Meanwhile, a two-man band called Acoustic Steel performed covers of music ranging from Neil Young's "Old Man" to Pink Floyd's "Breathe" to a ten year old song by Snow Patrol. It was refreshing for a band that looked for all the world to be a modest folk outfit to be doing such a good job with songs from the better part of classic rock, though they occasionally strayed into the douchebag canon, causing at least one young man at another table to lose his cool and start singing along.
Having exhausted the plausible beer options, I had a maragarita for my second drink. Out trollish waitress made it super strong and accidentally added salt and then tried to wipe it away. But it ended up as a saline layer at the bottom, a place the straw tended to pull from.
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